Achieving success took decades

Robert Adams died in 1944 when he was 97. Like his brother William, Robert related recollections of coming to Texas with his hard-luck English immigrant family in 1852. Their parents came seeking a better life; it eluded them and took decades before their children achieved the success their parents crossed an ocean to find.

Robert, born in Norfolk, England, came to Corpus Christi with his family when he was five. They arrived in Corpus Christi in November 1852 and soon moved into the country. They lived on a farm at Avery Point. When they arrived, Army headquarters were located in Corpus Christi; supplies were carried on mule trains to forts on the frontier. Army sentries patrolled the edge of town, on the lookout for hostile Indians; Robert's mother would hear coyotes howling and think the Indians were coming.

Mrs. Gravis, a widow, kept a hotel. B.F. Neal printed the paper. The Ohlers lived on the hill; one day Robert saw them boiling soap in an iron pot. "It was yellow and was sold in the town." Old man Kinghorn was a wheelwright and Jim Barnard kept a saloon. D.S. Howard and Col. Moore were digging a canal in the mud flats ... "I went through there once with my father; they were mud flats sure enough. Everything behind the boat was just loblolly, thick mud."

The schoolteacher, Mr. Craft, taught in a red brick building on Water Street. A couple named Holthaus (he was German and she was French) owned a bakery on Chaparral. On his first Fourth of July in Texas, Robert went across the bay with his father in John Dix's schooner to get watermelons at the Hatch place at Ingleside. Old man Priour lived at the Salt Lake west of town, where he grew vegetables to sell. His wife was the daughter of old lady Hart, who had a store.

"The country was beautiful, with grass 3 to 4 feet high," Robert said. "It was wild grass that made good hay. Chaparral Street used to be full of wagons; there was a good demand for this hay for the mules and horses."

When he was 8, his father arranged for him to work as an apprentice for a freighter, Samuel Colon. "He shipped goods out of Corpus by oxcart to all parts of the country. He was living in town then; later he moved to Nuecestown. One day Colon broke my leg; he would have broken my neck if George Reynolds (another English immigrant) hadn't interfered."

When he was living with Colon, Robert gathered salt at the Laguna Madre. "When the water came in high, it filled all the shallow lakes, and when it receded the salt could be gathered. It was in small grains, about the size of peas. You had to take it out of the water, which was about two inches deep. We would pile the salt on the bank and let it drain, and later put it into sacks or buckets. The wagons used for hauling salt were drawn by six yoke of oxen. We would go up the old salt road, which ran to Nuecestown. Here it was stored in a small house to be sold. Most of it was exchanged, not sold. All of North Texas came to Corpus to get salt (during the war) for home use and for stock."

Robert left Colon in 1862 to work at the Holthaus bakery. That winter, when he was 15, he was sent to Victoria to get a supply of yellow sugar used to make cookies. They took two oxcarts; a man named Long drove one and Robert drove the other. "The road wasn't very good, and we had to ford all the rivers. One of these was the Guadalupe at Victoria. It was all I could do to keep on my feet, the current was so swift. Of course I walked alongside the oxen to drive them across. You had to whip them."

He left the bakery in 1863 and moved to Casa Blanca. His father made a deal for William and him to take charge of Belden and Gilpin's sheep on shares. "William stayed only one year, when he quit and went off; that left it all on me. I stayed the three years out. One time I didn't have any clothes or shoes to wear. I dressed me some sheep skins and made me a pair of buckskin pants and some shoes. I made them with my hands . . . Buckskin is warm until it gets wet. But if it gets wet, if a norther comes, you do get cold. I never saw a house for a year, and was not inside a house for over two years. The elements were my roof and the wilds were my house. I did most of my own cooking for four years, and had nothing to eat but meat. I had no bread and didn't know what a vegetable looked like."

Robert Jr. married Eliza Lorena McWhorter in 1867; they lived in a jacal, a hut, at the sheep camp. He and William went into a partnership in the sheep business; when the sheep era came to an end, they turned to cattle. The partnership was dissolved after William bought his own ranch near Alice. In 1939, Robert Adams celebrated his 92nd birthday with a chicken barbecue in a grove of elm trees, hung with moss, on his Tecolote Ranch, eight miles north of Alice. He died in on Aug. 26, 1944 when he was 97. Among those attending his funeral was his baby sister, Mary Ann Hinnant, who lived to be 108 before she died in 1964.

The Adams brothers and other pioneers have been gone a long time. The world they found, and the world they helped to shape, doesn't exist anymore. But the memories of that world, of the way things used to be, survive. That past has a strong pull on us, whether we know it or not.

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This is the third of three columns about the Adams brothers based on their own accounts. William was interviewed on Dec. 14, 1938 at the home of Mrs. A.M. French. Robert's interviews were conducted at his ranch and at the home of his daughter, Mrs. L.G. Collins, from March 14, 1939 to Sept. 12, 1940. The name of the interviewer is not listed on the papers.